"Well, there's a good time coming. I must go and change my things now. But, Mary, mind you get near me this evening; I have such a deal to say to you." And then Miss Dunstable marched out of the room.
All this had been said in so loud a voice that it was, as a matter of course, overheard by Mark Robarts—that part of the conversation, of course, I mean which had come from Miss Dunstable. And then Mark learned that this was young Frank Gresham, of Boxall Hill, son of old Mr. Gresham of Greshamsbury. Frank had lately married a great heiress—a greater heiress, men said, even than Miss Dunstable; and as the marriage was hardly as yet more than six months old, the Barsetshire world was still full of it.
"The two heiresses seem to be very loving, don't they?" said Mr. Supplehouse. "Birds of a feather flock together, you know. But they did say some little time ago that young Gresham was to have married Miss Dunstable himself."
"Miss Dunstable! why, she might almost be his mother," said Mark.
"That makes but little difference. He was obliged to marry money, and I believe there is no doubt that he did at one time propose to Miss Dunstable."
"I have had a letter from Lufton," Mr. Sowerby said to him the next morning. "He declares that the delay was all your fault. You were to have told Lady Lufton before he did any thing, and he was waiting to write about it till he heard from you. It seems that you never said a word to her ladyship on the subject."
"I never did, certainly. My commission from Lufton was to break the matter to her when I found her in a proper humor for receiving it. If you knew Lady Lufton as well as I do, you would know that it is not every day that she would be in a humor for such tidings."
"And so I was to be kept waiting indefinitely because you two between you were afraid of an old woman! However, I have not a word to say against her, and the matter is settled now."
"Has the farm been sold?"
"Not a bit of it. The dowager could not bring her mind to suffer such profanation for the Lufton acres, and so she sold five thousand pounds out of the funds and sent
